FAA Approves the Boeing 787 for Flight: How the FAA Was Convinced

Boeing’s Dreamliner can fly again. Recent tests have convinced both the FAA and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood that fixes made to the airplane’s lithium-ion battery system are working. The 787 has been grounded since two emergencies caused by the batteries in January.

The duration of the grounding shows two things: How serious the problems were—and how hard it has been to ensure that they won’t happen again.

In fact, nobody can be sure that they won’t happen again. Boeing has admitted that the exact cause of the two battery meltdowns has not been nailed and may never be.

So, to be precise, the “fix” does not mean that the batteries will not fail again. What Boeing has persuaded the regulators of is that if similar events do recur they won’t jeopardize the safety of the airplane—either in flight or on the ground. In effect, they’ve locked the batteries in a steel vault and removed any chance that a fire could happen. The batteries could still experience what’s called a “thermal runaway,” in other words a meltdown, but not ignite. That is the claim.

The timing of the FAA’s announcement is interesting. First—and this may just be coincidence—it comes when all media are totally and rightly engaged in the consequences of the Boston Marathon bombing. Second—not so much of a coincidence—it comes between two public hearings held by the National Transportation Safety Board focused on the use of lithium-ion batteries in airplanes.

The first, last week, made it abundantly clear, from testimony by both the manufacturers of lithium-ion batteries and independent experts, that the development of these batteries is moving way too fast for regulators to keep up with. One industry witness said that the technology was still “very immature.” (I’ve been trying for weeks to parse what “mature” means in this context but nobody seems to know.)

The way lithium-ion batteries are used in the 787 marked a significant increase in their size and in the demands made of them. The standards the FAA used ten years ago to certify them as safe to fly were out of date before they were promulgated. This will be publicly aired by the NTSB hearing to be held next week, along with other uncomfortable details suggesting that Boeing rushed the process.

We are now supposed to believe that the new standards that Boeing met in order to get the 787 back in the air are adequate, but at the last NTSB hearing there was no sense of a consensus that they were. There were even arguments about which particular body of experts was qualified to write the standards, and complaints about the lack of transparency of the whole process.

It’s beyond argument that the conditions of normal airline operation weren’t replicated in either the test flights or the lab tests. They couldn’t be. You can’t tell that any airplane system will work as intended until it’s subjected to the frequency and stresses of frequent flying, including all the variations in the way they are maintained and serviced around the world.

Here’s the bottom line: The FAA’s determination of whether any airplane is safe to fly comes in a deep body of regulations under the title of FAR 25/1309. Put simply, this says that no single failure of any airplane system should result in catastrophe. In other words, the airplane must be protected by backup systems that isolate and contain any single failure. In the case of the 787, Boeing and the FAA are saying that that standard has been met.